Posthuman Blues

I like coming up with paranoid conspiracy theories. One of them -- never before posted -- involves the growing concern over ominous-looking jet contrails -- sometimes dubbed "chemtrails" because of presumed nefarious chemical properties.

As this site shows, contrails are taken seriously because they alter climate. We inhabit an age of ubiquitous air-travel; just as our cars contribute to global warming, jet exhaust wreaks its own havoc in our atmosphere. And the more planes there are up there spewing exhaust, the more the atmosphere is disturbed.





Imagine, for a moment, that a secret group of U.S. government scientists produced compelling evidence that jet contrails threatened to produce a cataclysmic effect on Earth's ecosystem, and that the only way to test their notion was to suspend a substantial portion of the Earth's air traffic in order to compare clear skies to polluted ones. Suppose that this is a dire study in need of immediate results. How to stop planes from flying? What would the government research group do? Petition major airlines all over the globe to refrain from flying for, say, a week or so in the name of science? Hardly. Besides, the study is secret; by telling airlines that they should forego their livelihood for the sake of an atmospheric study would immediately clue everyone in to the fact that the U.S. government is terrifically concerned about something having to due with the environmental impact of commercial airflight.

So the group would have to act behind the curtain, somehow bringing world commercial aviation to a virtual halt without letting anyone know why.

Enter the 9-11-01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Forget everything you ever heard about Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Muslim extremists. What if the entire 9-11 debacle was an epic sleight of hand contrived to help desperate scientists understand something far scarier than the most anti-American Evil-Doer? What if something horrible is happening to our atmosphere, something so potentially apocalyptic that the deaths of several thousand New Yorkers were considered a justifiable expense?

Finally, a few words of caution. Do I really think the above scenario is for real? No, I don't. But I think it makes a weird sort of logic; it wouldn't surprise me if some people did believe it. And there are all sorts of phenomena just waiting to be added to the central theme: UFOs, anomalous solar flares (of which there have been quite a few recently), HAARP, ozone depletion . . .

There. I've committed the meme to the Web. Now it's your turn.